Random SFUSD

Definitely not a typical SFUSD photoblogging shot. But I like it. And its been way too long without a new entry in the series.

If you have any shots you'd like to contribute to the series, send it my way.

LA Times : Mind the (achievement) gap

Here's a tasty link to a series of op-ed articles from the LA Times that is worth checking out:

Mind the (achievement) gap - Los Angeles Times

What's causing academic performance by Black and Latino students to lag the rest of California? Can, and should, something be done about it. All this week Russlyn Ali, executive director of Education Trust-West, will debate Richard Rothstein, author of Class and Schools, on the achievement gap.

So far the series comprises three articles:

• Mind the (achievement) gap
• No Child to the rescue?
• What’s causing the gap?

This series follows on the heels of Superintendent Jack O'Connell's "Achievement Gap Summit" which, frankly, did not generate as much noteworth reporting as I had hoped. I think it was admirable of O'Connell to bring so many notable educators together to address the issue head-on. I'm just not so sure that the meeting generated any tangible results of galvanized anyone into action. But don't take my word for it. Check out Michael Krasny's KQED 11/14 Forum show from that summit: Live from Sacramento - Achievement Gap featuring an interview with Superintendent O'Connell.

The enrollment clock starts ticking...

December 7th is the deadline for applications to Lowell. The deadline for submitting SOTA "pre-application" forms is one week later, on December 14th. While it is possible to submit that form later, applicants must submit this application by the 14th to secure a January audition.

These are just the first of many enrollment dates that are creeping up on us.

"Persistently Dangerous" swept under the rug

This Washington Post article explores a NCLB problem that has been apparent for anyone who's been paying attention: 'No Child' Data on Violence Skewed

A little-publicized provision of the No Child Left Behind Act requiring states to identify "persistently dangerous schools" is hampered by widespread underreporting of violent incidents and by major differences among the states in defining unsafe campuses, several audits say. Out of about 94,000 schools in the United States, only 46 were designated as persistently dangerous in the past school year.

Sure enough, the way NCLB was written there is no reason to expect anyone to willingly have their school designated "persistently dangerous". So everyone plays along with rules designed to make sure no school suffers this death sentence. And why should they? There is no upside. Nothing is there to help the schools deal with school safety problems.

Safe Schools was a common theme for all participants in the Student Enrollment Recruitment and Retention Initiative (SERR) process. School safety is obviously very important to families. Anything that can be done to help focus attention on improving safety should be done — including shining a light on safety issues to focus policy attention on identifying and addressing these problems. The scarlet letter approach of NCLB obviously failed. Time to rethink the goals and approaches and come up with a better way to identify and address campus safety problems.

High Schools for Equity: Data and background on school selection

Last week we published a critique of a recent publication by Stanford professors Linda Darling-Hammond and Diane Friedlaender. The critique was titled Stanford study's "success" story questioned. A great deal of discussion ensued on the list and in the comments here, including a detailed response from the study's authors.

I am now happy to republish the full text of their response here with their permission. You can find the original version here:

---

High Schools for Equity: Data and background on school selection

November, 2007

Based on a conference presentation releasing a new report last week, Caroline Grannan has raised a number of questions about the rationale for our selection of June Jordan School for Equity in a study of schools succeeding with African American and Latino students in California. We are sure that her concerns arise from the same motive as our own — a desire to support strong education for children of color in California. However, our data sources and interpretations are different. We used data on achievement that are disaggregated by race and class, and data directly from school records on student transfers and college-going which are more accurate than what seems to be available to Ms. Grannan. For those who are interested, below we provide information that explains why we selected June Jordan for the study and more descriptive information on the school's context.

A central difference in our perspectives is that Ms. Grannan compares data on overall API scores and college-going rates for a number of schools without disaggregating the data by race. We selected our schools in 2005-06 based on their successes in high school graduation, college-going and achievement for low-income students and students of color. We looked at schools in comparison to others in their neighborhoods. For 2005-2006, June Jordan — with a population that was 70% African American and Latino — had an overall API base score of 605, which was lower than that of some nearby schools with very different populations, such as Balboa, with a population that was 61% white and Asian, and Burton (54% white and Asian), but higher than that of other comprehensive high schools serving more similar students in the district, such as Mission High School with an API score of 563 (61% African American and Latino students), John O'Connell High School (81% African American and Latino) with an API score of 553.

More pertinent for our purposes is the fact that June Jordan's API scores for African American and Latino students were considerably higher than those of all of the other surrounding schools, including Balboa and Burton. (See table below).

Table 1: API scores of nearby schools, 2005-2006

	JJSE	Balboa	Mission	O'Connell	Burton
API Base Scores	605	672	553	553	663
API African Am.	525	479	448	n/a	476
API Latino	611	575	513	549	569

June Jordan had substantially higher English Language Arts (ELA) CST scores for African American and Latino students than all of these schools by a considerable margin, often showing proficiency rates 10 to 20 percentage points higher for similar students. (See Table 2.)

Table 2: ELA CST scores proficient or above of nearby schools, 2005-2006

	JJSE	Balboa	Mission	O'Connell	Burton
All Students
CST ELA 9th Gr	32%	47%	19%	21%	39%
CST ELA 11th Gr.	29%	33%	17%	14%	31%
Af. Am. Students
CST ELA 9th Gr.	22%	15%	6%	10%	6%
CST ELA 11th Gr	23%	20%	17%	5%	14%
Latino Students
CST ELA 9th Gr.	46%	27%	13%	19%	25%
CST ELA 11th Gr.	26%	20%	13%	14%	13%

June Jordan also had substantially higher pass rates on the CAHSEE exit exam in 10th grade in ELA than all of these other schools — for all students as well as for African American and Latino students (See Table 3.) JJSE's ELA passage rate of 72% far surpassed the next closest ELA passage rate, which was Balboa's, at a pass rate of 53%. JJSE surpassed all the other schools except for Burton in overall pass rates in mathematics, and surpassed all — including Burton — in math pass rates for African American and Latino students.

Table 3: CAHSEE passage rates of nearby schools, 2006

	JJSE	Balboa	Mission	O'Connell	Burton
All Students
ELA Passed	72%	53%	44%	43%	51%
Math Passed	58%	56%	39%	39%	67%
Af. Am. Students
ELA Passed	69%	41%	40%	37%	34%
Math Passed	44%	30%	16%	28%	38%
Latino Students
ELA Passed	69%	39%	36%	41%	55%
Math Passed	57%	41%	31%	39%	50%

Our data analysis also examined graduation rates and college-going rates. With access to meticulously coded individual student data, we used the state metric for calculating a graduation rate from the school, which adjusts for transfers and counts dropouts. (The state had not yet done this calculation, because JJSE was just completing its first graduating class.) Using the state calculation method (described in our report), we found that JJSE had a graduation rate of 95%, with two students from the cohort still in school finishing a fifth year of high school.

We did track losses of students that occurred when June Jordan moved locations from its original site on the San Francisco State University campus to its current site, far from many of its initial students' neighborhoods. We also tracked, in our longer case study, the number of students who did not graduate but are still at the school completing credits, expected to graduate next year. We collected data that tracked the transitions of students into and out of the school (including where those who left transferred to and their likelihood of graduation). Finally, we attended to changes in the student composition of the school over time, which can influence a variety of outcomes.

Finally, we documented, with individual student data, the fact that 73% of the school's graduates were admitted to four-year colleges and 95% to 2- or 4-year colleges. Although Ms. Grannon questions whether the June Jordan's college-going rate is noteworthy, this four-year college-going rate is nearly three times the state average, for a school with many more students of color, and its overall college-going rate is comparable to that of Balboa, which has fewer than half as many African American and Latino students.

As these comparisons are made, it is worth noting that JJSE has the highest percentage of African-American students of any high school in San Francisco Unified School District, except for the "second chance" continuation schools. In 06-07, JJSE's student population was 37% African American, ISA's was 35%, and all others were below 20% — Marshall 19%; Mission 18%; Wallenberg 18%; Burton 15%; Balboa 13%; SOTA 12%; O'Connell 11%; Washington 8%; Galileo 7%; Lincoln 7%; and Lowell 3%.

Our study was completed before state test scores were published for 2006-07. However, we are aware that the scores for JJSE went down that year, as its population grew by nearly 50%, from 254 to 371. In that year, the share of African American and Latino students served at JJSE also increased from 70% to 73%. We are also aware that two of the comparison schools — Balboa and O'Connell — lost so many African American students between the two years that they no longer have an African American subgroup whose scores are counted. The lower scores that incoming students brought with them to JJSE in their first year in the school will be a new challenge for the staff. We believe the staff should be evaluated on how they raise student achievement in the years to come, and that all analyses of school progress and accomplishment should be sensitive to these issues of student populations and migration that are essential to interpreting how schools are serving students.

Respectfully,

Linda Darling-Hammond and Diane Friedlaender,
School Redesign Network at Stanford University

Novice teacher, troubled school

It's really hard to reconcile this account of a neophyte teacher's struggle with the optimistic goals of the school, EXCEL in Oakland. Ouch.

Oakland Tribune
11/27/07
Teacher tries to focus on progress
New instructor struggles in Oakland school
By Katy Murphy, STAFF WRITER

Most weekday mornings around 7:05, Andy Kwok picks up the remote, switches off the television and rises from his living room couch. More than 12 hours will pass before the West Oakland biology teacher returns to the quiet comfort of his Fremont apartment.

Some days, it's hard to make it out the door to go to work.

"I just don't want to make that trek over here and endure a lot of tough times from the students," he said.

Kwok, 22, graduated from the University of Michigan this year with extensive knowledge of science — and a layman's understanding of teaching. The St. Louis, Mo., native left his family and friends behind to teach biology at EXCEL, a new high school on the McClymonds campus that aims to send its mostly low-income, African-American students to college.

But singing, cursing and high-volume bickering sometimes overshadow the novice teacher's lesson plans, making him feel more like a babysitter than a high school teacher. Read the rest of the article

High school open houses this week and next

For 8th-grade students and parents, here's a schedule of high school open houses for this week and next:

City Arts & Tech, Tuesday, Nov. 27, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
June Jordan School for Equity, Tuesday, Nov. 27, 6 p.m.
Lincoln, Thursday, Nov. 29, 6-7:30 p.m.
O'Connell, Thursday, Nov. 29, 6 p.m.
SOTA, Friday, Nov. 30, 1-3 p.m.
Balboa, Tuesday, Dec. 4, 6-8 p.m.
Gateway, Tuesday, Dec. 4, 6-7:30 p.m.
Leadership, Thursday, Dec. 6, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
SOTA, Friday, Dec. 7, 1-3 p.m."

Enrollment Workshops Galore

PPS and SFUSD are collaborating on a series of enrollment workshops. Some have already occurred, but many more remain to help the harried school shoppers out there.

Here is the complete schedule for the remaining enrollment workshops.

John Muir – Tuesday, November 27, 2007
380 Webster St./Page St.

Sheridan – Thursday, November 29, 2007
431 Capitol Av./Farallones St.

Middle School Enrollment Workshop:
Horace Mann – Tuesday, December 4, 2007
3351 23rd St./Valencia St.

High School Enrollment Workshops:
ISA – Thursday, December 6, 2007
655 Deharo St./18th St.

P. Burton – Tuesday, December 11, 2007
400 Mansell St./Goettingen St.

Enrollment Workshops EPC Extended Hours: 5pm-7pm
SFUSD – Monday, December 3, 2007
555 Franklin St./ McAllister St.

SFUSD – Monday, December 10, 2007
555 Franklin St./ McAllister St.

All Enrollment Workshops will be held at the school sites from 5:00PM-7:00PM. District and PPS staff will be available at each of the workshops to provide important enrollment information and to collect 2008-2009 Enrollment Applications from families.

Taming the Beast, in your inbox

Time for a little cross promotion for our nascent web publication,Taming the College Beast.

"The Beast" is a web resource aimed at families going through the college admissions process, and for those alert folks who want to be prepared for the process in the years ahead. As we dig into the subject it becomes clear that years of preparation are a very, very good idea.

So far it comprises a blog, a calendar, and a selection of useful links. We have plenty of ideas for other resources, like a discussion group, a reference desk... The basic idea is to expand access to the kinds of resources and information that is well known to school counselors and pros, but obscure to most families — especially those families in the public school system that do not have the depth of support found in private schools.

So please visit the blog, subscribe to our feed, drop a bookmark, or — better yet — subscribe to our daily digest email service that will deliver all new articles to your email inbox in one or less emails per day. The service is delivered via FeedBlitz, a well-known, reputable service provider. All contact info will be kept in confidence and used solely to deliver our news to you.

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As always, if you have ideas or comments, please leave them here or email them to me.

Lincoln's Biotech curriculum gets good press

Lincoln's outstanding biotech curriculum, pioneered at Lincoln by teacher George Cachianes and now replicated in other SFUSD schools, gets some much deserved good press in these two articles. The first one appeared in the Chron back on 11/17, followed by a feature in the NY Times.

Congratulations to everyone involved. This is not a flash in the pan, overnight success. This program has been building on its successes for years now. Let's hope it can be scaled up to thrive in other schools and has an impact on other science curricula throughout the district.

Chron: High school biowizards break new ground in winning competition

When Robert Ovadia got his invitation, he couldn't believe it.

He and four other students from his biotechnology class at Abraham Lincoln High School not only had an offer of paid summer lab jobs, they also would have a chance to square off against the world's powerhouse science universities.

NYTimes: English, Algebra, Phys Ed ... and Biotech

MORE than a decade ago, after George Cachianes, a former researcher at Genentech, decided to become a teacher, he started a biotechnology course at Lincoln High School in San Francisco. He saw the class as way of marrying basic biotechnology principles with modern lab practices — and insights into how business harvests biotech innovations for profit.

If you’re interested in seeing the future of biotechnology education, you might want to visit one of George Cachianes’s classrooms. “Students are motivated by understanding the relationships between research, creativity and making money,” he says.

Lincoln has five biotech classes, each with about 30 students. Four other public high schools in San Francisco offer the course, drawing on Mr. Cachianes’s syllabus. Mr. Cachianes, who still teaches at Lincoln, divides his classes into teams of five students; each team “adopts” an actual biotech company.

USA Today: As China booms, so does Mandarin in U.S. schools

Here's a nice article from USA Today about the growth of Mandarin education in the US that focuses on SF's Starr King ES. Check out the accompanying slide show with lots of pictures from the school:

"Chinese isn't the new French - it's the new English"

Children at Starr King Elementary School in San Francisco learn science and math in Mandarin and spend just one hour a day speaking English in the classroom. Mandarin language prograsm in schools in the USA grew more than 100% in the last two years

Q&A: API scores online?

Yesterday I found myself answering some questions about school API data asked by a parent in the midst of the school enrollment process. Seems relevant for this venue, so here's a reprise of the conversation:

Back in August, the Chron published a stand-alone section with SF's API scores. I happened to have recycled that paper. I've been searching online at both sfgate and the district site, to no avail. Has anyone by chance found that info on the web somewhere?

You can get them from the links on this blog post: 2006 SFUSD API data

In particular, the summary spreadsheet makes it easy to see the data for each school over the whole 7 year span. I also publish the detailed data that shows all of the subgroup data as well as the data that goes into the "SCI" that is used to conjure up the "similar schools" ranks.

Thanks for the info, I had a look at it all and have no idea what all the numbers mean, Is there somewhere that tells you what all the abbreviations are and what the numbers really tell you?

The short answer is, they mean very little. Relying on standardized testing data is a really rotten way to assess schools for your child. It is no substitute for the up- close, in-person experience of visiting with and talking to members of a school community.

That said...

The state provides a lot of documentation of the data at this site:
Academic Performance Index (API)

and this one that documents *all* the acronyms:
API Data Files - Academic Performance Index

Let's keep it relatively simple and look at the summary data which tabulate the API score, the Statewide Rank, and the Similar Schools Rank.

The API score is based on all the standardized, "norm referenced" testing -- STAR testing -- that most public school students throughout the state have to take. The scores range from 200 to 1000 -- and the goal is for all schools to reach an 800 score. If they are not there yet, they are given targets and progress is monitored.

The Statewide Rank is purely based on API score. All schools are put into ten buckets of equal size based on their API. From there they get a 1-10 score. (Elementary, Middle, and High schools have separate sets of buckets. Lots of other meaningless fine print pertains.)

The Similar School Rank is supposed to adjust the ranking based on the demographic factors affecting the students at each school. If there are more language learners, higher rates of poverty, more special education kids, more parents without college degrees... the schools API scores are put on a curve.

The SCI, or "School Characteristic Index", is the key to this curve. There are reams of data that are collected about all CA students that are then thrown into a massive regression analysis that looks at how relevant the individual demographic data are when correlated to API scores. With this correlation, the demographics of each school are then used to weight or curve the actual API results.

So Clarendon ES, with high scores and high statewide ranks can appear to have mediocre results while Sanchez ES has a low rank but may be doing very well with the challenges its students face.

The cold numeric way the SCI and "Similar" schools are computed is open to skepticism. Some odd bedfellows are inevitably lumped together as "similar". It is interesting and useful to try and adjust the pure test scores based on demographics. But it is just as likely to prove the limits of testing data as it is to render more useful ways of looking at that testing data.

Stanford study's "success" story questioned

Stanford University's School Redesign Network has done a study that supposedly identifies five successful high schools around the state that should be emulated by other schools. The study is being promoted by respected Stanford education pundit Linda Darling-Hammond at the Achievement Gap Summit currently being held in Sacramento.

Two San Francisco schools are cited — June Jordan and Leadership, neither of which is viewed as a particularly successful school within the community (and I speak as an 8th-grade mom who is currently looking at and schmoozing endlessly with other parents about high schools).

June Jordan, in fact, has the lowest API of any SFUSD high school except Newcomer (all brand-new immigrants with limited/no English) and continuation schools.

I'm sorry to those who are offended by this, but the numbers are really troubling here, considering these schools are being cited statewide as success stories.

I am only responding to the fact that June Jordan was singled out and cited in this study; I am not trying to bash it wantonly.

???

June Jordan info:

• June Jordan posted the lowest API of the 17 regular district high schools this past spring (does not include Wells or Newcomer) - 517

• Next lowest was ISA with 559, Mission with 575, and O'Connell with 577 (all other schools are 640 or higher)
• All three schools closest to JJ serve VERY similar populations, without all the "freedom" of June Jordan, and still are doing significantly better.
  

And June Jordan's API has dropped every year they have been open — from a base of 657 the first year(03-04), to 650 the second year, to 608 the third year, before hitting bottom at 575 this past spring. So, down 82 points in 4 years, with a drop every single year.

June Jordan has two subgroups which are now large enough to have their own API score - African American students and socioeconomically disadvantaged students. The 2005 base API for AA kids was 590, but dropped to 525 for 2006 and again to 459 in 2007 (a drop of 131 points in just the two years since this group has had a large enough population to get a subgroup score.)

The 2005 base API for socioeconomically disadvantaged kids was 635, and dropped
to 593 in 2006 and to 499 in 2007, a drop of 136 points in just those two years. Their Latino students just got a subgroup score; they dropped from a 2006 base of 611 to 528 in 2007 - down 83 points in one year.

In addition, June Jordan seems to have a problem with shedding or failing to graduate AA students:
Quick report of AA students in the class of '07
Males - 9th grade 13; 10th grade 18; 11th grade 8; 12th grade 8
Females - 9th grade 18; 10th grade 16; 11th grade 10; 12th grade 8
Note that thus far, this is the only class to have graduated — so the claim of sending 80% or more of its kids to college is based on just one year of graduates — and nearby Balboa High School sends 96% of its graduates to college.

And JJ only sent 60% of its graduates to a 4 year college.

And only 63 of the 97 who started there in 03-04 were actually on track to graduate. So if you consider that about 60% went to 4 year colleges, and something like 90% to any college, shouldn't it be based on the number who started, not the number who graduated? So if 10%
didn't go to college, out of 63, then that means only 57 went to (any) college, out of 97 who started there as freshmen — 58.7%

Their 1 year dropout rate in 04-05 (the most recent year for which data is available on the CDE website) is 7.1%, compared to a district average of 1.9%

According to their SARC , their suspension rate for 04-05 (again, the most recent data
available) was 15.76%, while the distriuct average was 4.74%

JROTC Fall Competition on YouTube

So you missed the JROTC Fall Competition? No worries, you can watch lots and lots of videos that are up on YouTube — if that's your thing! Here's the Washington squad's routine:

School Beat: The Power of One Voice

BeyondChron's School Beat features Dana Woldow's account of one school's successful transition from a sugar saturated, junk food Halloween to a more healthy alternative:

School Beat: The Power of One Voice

On Halloween, with the City focused on whether the Castro would explode, a minor miracle was unfolding across town in the Presidio, where a preschool was planning its first ever Halloween celebration - without candy! Almost as noteworthy as the absence of Snickers bars was the fact that this healthy holiday celebration came about entirely because of the unwavering commitment of one parent.

Board of Education - Nov 13, 2007

The webcast of the BOE meeting of 11/13 is available.

The main event last night was supposed to be a resolution to allow the JROTC program to continue for another year. However, the resolution was tabled shortly before the meeting. The Chronicle notes:

A controversial resolution that would have granted a one-year reprieve to the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps in San Francisco schools was pulled off the school board's agenda Tuesday night minutes after the meeting started.

Board President Mark Sanchez, a co-author of the measure, said he believed there wasn't enough support for the measure as it was written.

"We need more discussion about it," he said.

Sounds like we will be hearing more about this issue in the coming months.

New York Times on Ohio's charter meltdown

Political twist: this article acknowledges the degree of support for charters among Democrats, though it makes clear that their main advocacy comes from the right. But it's really about charters that don't serve kids. It also doesn't go into the rampant theft and fraud by Ohio charter operators, which is evident if you follow the news day by day.

New York Times: Ohio Goes After Charter Schools That Are Failing
Nov. 8, 2007
By Sam Dillon

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio became a test tube for the nation’s charter school movement during a decade of Republican rule here, when a wide-open authorization system and plenty of government seed money led to the schools’ explosive proliferation.

But their record has been spotty. This year, the state’s school report card gave more than half of Ohio’s 328 charter schools a D or an F.

Now its Democratic governor and attorney general, elected when Democrats won five of Ohio’s six top posts last November, are cracking down on the schools, which receive public money but are run by independent operators. And across the country, charter school advocates are watching nervously, fearful the backlash could spread.

Attorney General Marc Dann is suing to close three failing charter schools and says he is investigating dozens of others. It is the first effort by any attorney general to close low-performing charter schools.

Gov. Ted Strickland said he wanted to carry out his own crackdown.

"Perhaps somewhere, charter schools have been implemented in a defensible manner, where they have provided quality," he said. "But the way they’ve been implemented in Ohio has been shameful. I think charter schools have been harmful, very harmful, to Ohio students."

Government of Edison, by Edison and for Edison

It looks like Edison Schools is proposing a new state oversight process designed to Edison's specifications and for its benefit. Hubris or just awareness of how much control the private sector really wields on public officials? That's more than a little chilling.

From Edison Schools' E2 Design Sketch:

New governance arrangements: Where we could not hold the charter directly, the workarounds we would deploy — a single board, composed of carefully recruited, sophisticated individuals loyal to Edison, that oversees all the schools in a state, the right to appoint one or even a majority of board members; the use of interlocking boards; the creation of nonprofit operating organizations; the recruitment of like-minded and supportive board members by Edison E2 fellows from their communities, and so on — would all greatly reduce the likelihood of board-Edison conflict and terminated relationships.

Edison's E2: Don't promise miracles this time

If there's one thing Edison Schools has learned in its checkered history, it's that clients take sales pitches literally. And this isn't a one-shot purchase — a baldness cure or a miracle weight-loss treatment that you unload on the client and then never look back. Edison presumably has an ongoing relationship with the customer and has to face the music if it doesn't deliver what it promised.

Seems like a no-brainer that Edison was a bit slow to learn.

Edison's E2 Design Sketch — its $15 million planned makeover — also, interestingly, calls the company's current ad campaign "risky in that regard." We aren't familiar with the current ad campaign, but that's an eye-catching admission.

Excerpts from the Design Sketch (which we've learned was produced in May 2007):

... the marketing campaign ... must also be exceedingly careful not to contain any implicit promises that we might not meet. The current advertising campaign is risky in that regard.

... we must be vigilant at all times about the promises, both implicit and explicit, that we make to all parties and about our ability, realistically, to execute consistently on these promises. Our credo in the E2 group must be to under-promise and over-deliver. We have learned how our enthusiastic talk is taken literally by customers and stakeholders and interpreted as a commitment. Our constant caution to make commitments wil be greatly admired by stakeholders — far more so than audacious claims and promises. ...restoration of trust with the opinion leaders in the school reform movement is our goal. That's why we have to be so very careful about what we commit to and the claims we advance. Anything that seems reckless, disingenuous, or arrogant undermines all the hard work we are and will continue to do to build trust.

The Design Sketch proposes a celebrity-endorsement campaign and emulation of another KIPP strategy, paid salespeople who curry relationships with press and community leaders.

We may want to consider signing accomplished, famous people who resonate with our targeted student population as Edison role models, linking their brand to our brand: famous intellectuals, artists, scientists, and civic leaders. Their influence could be deployed though personal appearances at Edison schools, videos, print media, desktop streamed video, student enrollment campaigns, and more. ...

E2 should have highly entrepreneurial and agile missionaries in each region — KIPP appropriately titles them "trailblazers" — who work with the E2 fellows [this seems to be a fancy name for school administrators] to establish roots and support in communities targeted for E2 schools. These trailblazers would recruit competent board members — civic leaders, educators, and so on; build relationships with education writers at the local dailies; cultivate local civic, business, and educational organizations; and get to know the local culture and its sensitivities.

And we think S.F. is contentious

I almost got distracted by wondering if Charles Dickens was writing headlines for the New York Sun, but once you get past " 'twixt" and "laid to," this incident reported in a Sun article is pretty creepy. Prominent education commentator Diane Ravitch, who formerly supported New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plans to overhaul the public school system, has become a critic. The New York Post ran an op-ed with the headline "HYPOCRITICAL CRITIC" that was entirely a highly personal attack on Ravitch's viewpoint and motives. Now it's revealed that Bloomberg's staff generated the op-ed.

Feud 'Twixt Wylde, Ravitch Laid to City's Machinations

BY ELIZABETH GREEN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
October 31, 2007

A scathing opinion piece deriding a prominent critic of Mayor Bloomberg's education policies was generated with the help of city officials, sources said yesterday.

The article, written by the president of the Partnership for New York City, Kathryn Wylde, and published in yesterday's New York Post, accuses Diane Ravitch of opposing the Bloomberg administration irrationally, despite formerly supporting the policies it has implemented, perhaps because of a personal grudge. It concludes that Ms. Ravitch is "no longer a source we can rely on for fair-minded commentary."

Ms. Ravitch yesterday said the piece plainly originated from the city's Education Department, calling it a "paid hit job" meant to silence all critics of the Bloomberg administration. "They're trying to intimidate me, and they're trying to silence me, and I'm not going to be silenced," Ms. Ravitch said.

This caught my eye especially because I have viewed Ravitch in the past as a hard-line, pro-high-stakes testing privatization advocate, and had been noting commentary by her that indicated she was dramatically softening her position. (She's still a Hoover Institution fellow, but must be an increasing outlier in that anti-public-education set.)

These points in the op-ed intending to make her look like some kind of vendetta-driven hypocrite instead prompt me to cheer her:

* Having once argued that the city should "apply a wrecking ball" to the old educational model, she now states that she does "not believe that it is prudent to destabilize a large school system."

* Ravitch formerly held that "principals must have the authority to make decisions that count and . . . be held accountable for student performance." Today, she mocks the idea of giving principals greater autonomy, saying it would create a destructive "every school for itself" environment. She now describes holding principals accountable for results as tantamount to "threats of humiliation."

* Although long a proponent of holding students to high standards — which relies on annual evaluations to assess to what extent children have mastered standards — she denies that improved test scores accurately measure the performance of New York City students.

* When the mayor announced a change in the formula for school funding nearly identical to one Ravitch has repeatedly endorsed, she attacked the city for "foisting" the system on schools too quickly.

* Long a critic of the argument that class size necessarily improves student achievement, she now appears to view it as a panacea.

You go, Diane! She responds to the controversy in this New York Post commentary.

The new Edison: how they'd teach

This is another on our series of posts about the Edison Schools Design Sketch for "E2," the makeover that Edison apparently hopes will help it reach the success that has previously been elusive.

Edison Schools' overall academic achievement has been pretty weak. Naturally, Edison wants to fix that. Here's something the company hasn't announced before: "We currently have many teachers who are very low skilled themselves." So, E2 would pay teachers more (see previous blog posts about how other economies would theoretically allow them to do that — unpaid student labor, large swaths of the day in minimally supervised "independent learning). The Design Sketch claims: " We would stake out a courageous and much-admired position if we called a stop to the obvious fallacy that uneducated adults can develop high-achieving students."

It's kind of hard for me to see why such a no-brainer would be a courageous and much-admired position, but that's why I'm not running an EMO.

The document contains lots of detail about the proposed curriculum. Among points that stand out to the layperson are the parts clearly aimed at winning favorable media coverage or staving off criticism.

Edison Schools use a style of reading curriculum (as do many others) called Direct Instruction (DI), which is based on a lot of rote drilling and chanting of phonetic principles and looks excruciatingly boring and joy-killing to anyone who loves reading. E2 proposes to add a program called the 100 Book Challenge from American Reading Company, which "would ... inoculate us against frequently heard objections to DI."

At high school level, E2 wants to teach rhetoric and oratory — and make sure the press knows about it.

"Rhetoric" and "oratory" are anachronisms in schooling, but our courageous revival of the disciplines would serve us and our students well — and be congratulated in the media.

As previously noted, Edison is pretty ticked that KIPP has seduced away its funders, reputation and ability to bewitch the press. But it plans to deal with that by being KIPP. The Design Sketch provides a nice clear summary of KIPP's culture.

The notion that all children require the same curriculum and education is one of the least challenged myths in American education. It's politically correct silliness, no more true than that children from urban poverty require the same health care services as affluent suburban children. ... One possibility is not to compromise in "tuning" the culture to the demographic we serve. It may be necessary to adjust the model slightly for middle-class and suburban settings. That is, the goals and vision will be the same, but we will choose behavior plans, reward systems, etc., appropriate to the circumstances and needs of the students.
...
KIPP's culture is suited to its population of students from economically and socially
disadvantaged families. KIPP recognizes that children from poverty differ not in the values their parents hold — low-income parents have "middle-class" aspirations for their children — but in the skills and habits with which they are equipped to realize these aspirations. When children first arrive at school in the fifth grade, they are taught to "dress for success," walk down the halls briskly, sit properly in their chairs without delay, stand up to greet someone, and look directly at a person when conversing. They are also taught how to organze their classroom materials. Students chant the school's rules, which include the acronym SLANT: Sit up, Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod your head so people know you are listening and understanding, Track your speaker by keeping your eyes on the person. All the students chant: "We SLANT at all times/We listen carefully at all times/We follow the teachers' instructions/We answer when given the signal/We stay focused to save time/We will always be nice and work hard."

These are social habits that we take for granted, but which are often absent in disadvantaged students, and are essential to creating a focused, disciplined culture that values achievement. ...

The E2 curriculum wil include explicit instruction in motivation and habits of school success. As part of the E2 development, we would craft an aray of rituals, slogans, and practices that support a compelling school culture that reshapes how students see themselves and their futures. This culture must be powerful enough to compete wth the culture of the streets. It should contain many of the same elements as the KlPP culture. .

E1 (the old Edison) featured an extra-long school year, as does KIPP. But E2 doesn't intend to spend the money on that.

While E1' s extended school year in principal [sic] greatly increased time on task over a child' s education. the longer year proved expensive and incompatible with district policies and many families' preferences. ...

Unlike E1, the new schools would operate on a regular school year of 180 days, but most schools (funding permitting) would also operate summer schools. Enrollment in summer school would be available to all students on a fee or grant-funded basis and would be mandatory for low-achieving students.

More on E2 in an upcoming post, featuring its marketing ideas and plans to win the hearts of the local press and community leaders.